Fernando Karadima, the abusive priest whose case scandalized the church in Chile, has died

the Former Chilean priest Fernando Karadima, convicted by the Vatican for sexual abuse in 2011, a notorious case that revealed a scandal of child abuse by local clergy, died at the age of 90 due to multiple illnesses in a retirement home in Santiago. He was Chile’s most notorious pedophile priest and complaints against him scandalized and undermined the prestige of the Catholic Church in that country.

Expelled from the priesthood by Pope Francis and condemned to live in prayer and penance after a canonical investigation, Karadima died at the San Juan de Dios home in Santiago without having fully specified the causes of his death. A few months ago, he was rushed to a hospital where he could not be admitted immediately due to the high occupancy of beds by the Covid-19. At this moment suffered from heart problems.

From the parish of Santiago d’El Bosque, located in Santiago, which he directed from 1980 to 2006, Karadima has forged strong ties with sectors of Chile’s political and economic elite over the years. He was one of the most influential figures in the episcopate for the formation of religious vocations, including four bishops, two of whom were also withdrawn from their dioceses due to accusations of sexual abuse of minors: Juan Barros, l bishop questioned from Osorno, and Horacio Valenzuela, from Talca.

The pastor of El Bosque he built an economic empire by becoming the priest of the Chilean business community and oligarchy who donated millionaires: he raised over $ 4,000 at every Sunday mass and received large contributions from the elite. At the same time, he committed a series of sexual, power and conscience abuses against minors in the 1980s and 1990s.

“One more link in this culture of perversion”

In 2011, Karadima was condemned in 2011 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Holy See to “a life of prayer and penance“and he was forbidden to have contact with former parishioners or to perform any ecclesiastical act publicly. Seven years later, he was expelled from the priesthood by the Vatican, the highest penalty applied within the ‘Catholic Church.

In 2019, a court ordered the Chilean Catholic Church to pay nearly $ 450,000 in compensation to three of the victims of the former priest, physician James Hamilton, philosopher José Andrés Murillo and journalist Juan Carlos Cruz, confronted today with the defense of the victims. sexual abuse committed within the Chilean Church.

“Fernando Karadima, a former Catholic priest who sexually and spiritually abused many people, has passed away, including us. Everything we had to say about Karadima has been said. He was one more link in this culture of perversion and cover-up in the Church, ”Hamilton, Murillo and Cruz said in a public statement. “We are at peace and we are only motivated to continue to fight so that these crimes do not happen again and for so many people who lived it and who still do not have justice ”.

The Chilean Catholic Church, in failure

The case of Fernando Karadima has become a landmark event that exposed the network of sexual abuse in Chilean Catholicism. Hamilton, Murillo and Cruz’s complaints they unleashed a wave of testimonies against the clergy which led to the biggest crisis of the Chilean ChurchAccording to official figures, up to 2019, more than 200 Church members have been investigated for more than 150 cases of sexual abuse, while more than 240 victims have been identified, including 123 children.

In a report released in May this year, for its part, the Center for the Prevention of Abuse and Reparation (CPR) of the Jesuit Congregation of Chile admitted that 64 people had been sexually abused by 11 members of its clergy who were investigated by the Catholic order itself between 2005 and 2020. A total of 17 Jesuits were studied in canonical processes by abuse complaints, of which the congregation attributed 11 responsibility for sexual abuse to 34 children and 30 adults.

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